Josh Eastburn.com

While getting my hair cut today, I was watching the World Cup on ESPN2. As soon as the France vs. Togo game had ended, they quickly cut to live coverage of the World Domino Championships. Since I was immobilized by the hair-cutting sheet-thing they put over you, I had no choice but to learn more about the World Domino Championships. Interviews of the top players were conducted and there were quotes like “there are good domino players and there are bad domino players, there is no in-between.” I suppose I am a bad domino player then.

But the WDC is not the only high-stakes competition this summer. Toronto will soon be hosting the 2006 Rock Paper Scissors International Championships. To help you prepare, here is an excerpt from the rulebook:

For those new to the game, the only acceptable throws are Rock, Paper and Scissors. Any use of Dynamite, Bird, Well, Spock, Water, Match, Fire, God, Lightning, Bomb, Texas Longhorn, or other non-sanctioned throws, will result in automatic disqualification.

All competitors are reminded that they PLAY AT THEIR OWN RISK.

I have recently come across an impressive new web site called Farecast which goes beyond what other travel sites offer. While Orbitz and Expedia will allow you to find the best price for a flight on any given day, they do not show you what that flight cost yesterday or a week ago. Farecast will show price history for your flight and gives advice on whether to buy the flight now, or wait for prices to drop. It is still in a private beta and currently only lets you search trips from Boston or Seattle, but I am looking forward to using the full service. Contact me if you want an invite to try it out. Link

Farecast’s price history chart:

While listening to an episode of This American Life, I heard about Found Magazine. It collects and publishes love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles – anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life. Anything goes…

Neighbor in Apt 21-

While I appreciate the fact that there are occasions when we end up being gone all evening when we don’t intend to, I found it difficult to remember this at 6:45 Sat morning when I was awakened by your alarm. Said alarm was loud enough that it sounded as if it were coming from my own apartment. Again, I recognize that things get forgotten, but I would truly appreciate any future measures you will take to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

Thank you very much,

Your neighbor in 31

Listen to Davy Rothbart from Found Magazine read some favorites that he has collected.

For naturalist David Attenborough’s 80th birthday, a poll was taken for his best television moment. The winning clip is of the Australian Lyrebird. In order to attract a mate, it mimics other birds, but also has an uncanny ability to reproduce man-made sounds, such as the shutter of a camera or a chainsaw.

A woman was surprised to find that Target would not sell her prints from her digital camera because they looked like professional photographs. They required a copyright release even though she was in one of the photos.

read more | digg story

Sony has put together a visually compelling ad for their Bravia line of TVs which involves hundreds of thousands of colorful, bouncing balls. From the Bravia Ad web site:

In an age when CGI is commonplace, this makes the commercial all the more extraordinary. Every single frame was shot over two days – with the main sequence involving a 23-man camera crew and only one chance to get it right.

An entire block was closed off and special compressed-air cannons shot the balls into the air, while earth moving equipment poured thousands down the street. Not that you’d know it from the finished product, but these balls can do some damage, so all the cars were props and crew members went so far as to having protective shields and crash helmets.

Sony doesn’t detail the cleanup job, but I’m sure they just unleashed hundreds of 5-year-olds in the area. Link (Thanks, James)

In Napoleon Dynamite, Jon Heder’s character describes a Liger, “It’s pretty much my favorite animal. It’s like a lion and a tiger mixed…bred for its skills in magic.”

While not typically bred for its skills in magic, it is quite an amazing animal, descending from a male lion and a female tiger. Hercules, a liger at the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species, in Miami, Florida, stands 10 feet tall on his hind legs and weighs over 1,000 pounds.

Ligers are not to be confused with Tigons, which are the offspring of a male tiger and a female lion and are much smaller in size. Link

Five weeks ago, several students from my alma mater, Taylor University, died in an accident on I-69 when a truck crossed the median and slammed into a school van. Four students and one staff member were killed.

In a tragic turn of events, it has been revealed this week that there has been a case of mistaken identity with two of the students. From the TU web site:

We had believed that Laura VanRyn was airlifted to Parkview Hospital and has recently begun to emerge from the coma she was in since the night of the accident. The Coroner’s office has notified us that Laura was instead one of the five people who died that evening and that it was Whitney Cerak who was airlifted to Parkview and is today convalescing at a hospital in Grand Rapids, MI.

It is hard to comprehend the extent of this mixup. Imagine waking from a coma and being surrounded by people you have never seen before, or missing your daughter’s funeral because she was buried as someone else. On the other hand, it is a moment of great joy for the family who thought their daughter was dead to find that she is still alive. Link